That’s a real conversation. Thankfully, my wife and I aren’t verbally dysfunctional all the time. My personal pet peeve are meetings that exhibit a similar sort of verbal confusion. Does this sound familiar?

JIM

We need X.

AMY

You can’t have Y.

JIM

X is really important.

AMY

We’ll never be able to get Y done in time.

This is a great way to blow half an hour before Jim and Amy discover that they aren’t even talking about the same thing.

This language barrier is particularly acute when business folks try to talk to IT folks. We’ve run into this problem a number of times. Here’s a good conversation on the topic. No solutions today, just venting... and laughing.